I find it interesting that of the things I said yesterday, the part you responded to the most was the part that bothered me the least, the bit about my hair and people who are nice to me because they think I’m pretty. That’s actually the part I care about the least. The fact that people treat you differently because of how you look is true, I don’t see the point in getting upset about it. I try my best not to judge people by their appearances, it’s something I work on every day, but because I work on that I find it hard to get angry with other people for doing it as that would be mad hypocritical.
I can be happy one day and feel I’m surrounded by friends and family that care about me and feel horribly alone the next and the only thing that would have changed is my feelings towards myself- I know for a fact that how I think people perceive me is a direct result of how I perceive myself; my own opinion is, and always has been, the biggest influence on how I see myself and who I think I am.
I don’t feel the need to prove myself to the world, when someone calls me stupid I get angry, not because I think I’m stupid, but because I know they’re saying that too insult me and I don’t take kindly to being insulted. When someone calls me ugly I usually come to the conclusion that they are in no position to decide that for me and that they’re wrong! I have never thought I’m ugly in the traditional sense, my relationship with the word ‘ugly’ is as complex as my relationship with the word ‘fat’- really I need some new words to describe those feelings because they are so grossly inaccurate but I have yet to find a decent analogue for them.
When my weight is lower, and my goal weight lower as a result, I know that my ‘ideal’ body would be ugly to 90% of the world and I don’t care. There are very few people in the world whose opinion of my looks I consider to be worth anything at all and they all think I look beautiful and always have done- the only standard of beauty I care for in regards to my own body is my own, just because I’ve taken the time and effort to find out where some of my influences have stemmed from does not at all mean those influences have the majority say in how I would like myself to look.
If the world’s opinion of me was the deciding factor in how I treat myself then I would think I was awesome. My first year of uni when I was clubbing twice a week and told by at least two or three people a night (boys and girls) that I was really pretty and a great dancer, when I was hanging with my friends 18 hours a day having more fun than I knew was possible and declaring to each other ‘you’re so funny’, you’re so smart’, ‘omg thats such a great idea’, ‘omg I love x about you’, ‘I love y about you’, ‘I love YOU’, ‘YOU’RE SO AWESOME, I’M SO GLAD WE’RE FRIENDS’, when I was getting consistently good grades from lecturers and talking to them during breaks in class and after class and having them call on me during class to offer my perspective on things, there was a whole load of external stimuli telling me that I had no reason to dislike myself and yet that was one of the darkest times for me because nothing anyone could ever tell me will make a blind bit of difference unless I believe it myself.
I don’t think I’ve explained this to you before, but I need to because otherwise none of your advice will make any sense- ED’s are extremely me-centric. That’s not even a word but it is now. My eating disorder is all about me and I think if you read through the blogs of other ED suffers you will see the same. The only a person could think that the world would be a better place to live in if they lose 10lbs is a person who’s fucking delusional. ‘People will think I’m pretty and amazing and just a great person to be around when I reach my GW’, ‘my whole life will fall into place once I’m skinny’ ect ect, like really?! Really though? It’s not going to happen.
Someone is horrible to you, your partner ignores you, your parents insult you again and the answer of an ED person is to cut or starve or binge because we deserve it because everything is our fault.
We blame everything on ourselves because it’s so much easier than looking at the complexities of life and facing the fact that there are something’s we cannot change or have control over and the few things we could control would most likely require us to give up our EDs, the one thing keeping us ‘safe’ from this world.
Most EDs start of about control, controlling your feelings by binging because eating is the only way you know how to make yourself feel happy again even if it’s just for a few moments, determining how you feel about yourself by the number on the scale because it’s the only tangible way you have judging yourself, not eating because people can tell you what to do with every aspect of your life but they can’t control that. As they go on they become more about other things, the self hatred (which inevitable once you start thinking everything that happens to you or around you boils down to you ED related actions, no one can take that kind of pressure), your brain functions differently once you starve it too much making you scared of food and addicted to cutting your intake (there are studies about that as well, I’ll link you if you’re interested), basically, once you get in too deep the disorder will take over, and whilst giving you illusion of control it will have robbed you of the ability to act, or even think, like a rational person.
Being able to step away from the mentality that everything is down to me and my weight (I’m struggling with this test because I’m fat, that guy said I was pretty because I’m ugly and he feels sorry for me, today is a shitty day because I haven’t reached my GW yet) and actually looking to other factors than my ED for the answers to my life, external or otherwise, was been hugely helpful for me when I first started trying to recover. Realising that I’m struggling with a test, not because I’m fat or stupid, but because I find this topic hard and have issues dealing with stress in a way that isn’t self-destructive means I can break out of the cycle ‘must eat less- must weigh less’ and instead focus on fixing the actual cause of the problem.
However, I was pretty much in recovery (or something much like that), in second year of uni after having fucked myself up in the summer with restricting and purging, and that year had some horrible upsetting events and I couldn’t deal with them. Because my whole ‘adult’ life I’d always had my ED to fall back on and I have no coping strategy for real life without it.
Then in third year some horrible shit went down again, and I relapsed HARD. Whilst it wasn’t good for me physically, it was the one thing that enabled me to excel in my studies and come out stronger than ever, it enabled me to keep myself relatively stable emotionally and provided a sense of comfort because a world that can be fixed by losing weight is a world that makes sense. And when I felt scared and overwhelmed I would clear my thoughts by planning my intake and projected weightloss for the next few weeks till I felt better, and when I didn’t feel like studying I would coerce myself with offers like ‘a piece of chocolate if you’re good’.
Things have been up and down since then but basically me and my ED have found an uneasy truce. The overwhelming self hatred side of things has pretty much gone (I have looked in the mirror before and actually thrown up because I was so disgusted, in comparison to that I fucking love myself these days), and I have learnt to accept that I starve ect because it makes me feel better and that it is my comping mechanism and that I am not actually responsible for all that goes on around me. As a result of that, I’m in a much better place mentally.
So basically, other people’s opinion of me in neither here nor there, it only influences me if I allow it too. The only opinion that matters is my own, and whilst I have made leaps and bounds in that area I’m still not as well adjusted as a normal person. As much as I have been able to free myself by accepting I am not the source of all thats wrong in the world and it can’t be controlled via my treatment of my body it still boils down to what I think of myself and until I fix that attitude and learn new, more constructive ways of dealing with the world, that will continue to be a problem for me.
So telling me to fuck what the world thinks is a nice idea but pretty much irrelevant to my issues.
[Sidenote: the above message is 1618 words long, like wtf, thats the length of a short essay, its 2.5 pages long in Word! In a way though I guess it just goes to show me why the rest of the world can be so mean to people with EDs, thoughts and ideas I take as self evident are not so self evident to normal people. Anyway, I’m trying to explain myself as best I can, I would suggest though asking more questions before throwing more advice at me because there’s good chance otherwise that it would make any sense to me or it would be something I have actually thought about/tried over the past 7 years of struggling with this stupid thing. Please don’t be offended by my suggestion, I’m saying it for my sake as well because it’s very easy to upset an ED person by treading all areas you wouldn’t even realise to be so touchy, such as telling a person who has taken it upon themselves to personally fix all that wrong in the world by improving herself to consider self improvement.]
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